Never hit your sales goals? Here is why!
If you feel like you have tried everything to reach your sales goals and you’re now wondering if you should drop your computer off a tall building and wipe all hopes of business success from your brain, you’re in the right place. Never hit your sales goals?
Let’s talk about why you may not be hitting your sales goals and why lack of customers often is your real problem.
Every new client or members club member I get wants the same thing, more sales. So to make more in sales and hit their goals, the plan is usually to find more customers and create and sell more products or services or offers.
The thing is if you’re already maxed out, finding more customers or creating more stuff to sell will add more to your to-do list. So instead, I want you to find your money leaks and gaps first, make sure you have a good attraction, connection, and conversion strategy and have a re-sell process.
Ahh… lots to discuss grasshopper….
Let’s work backwards and start with the end goal of sales.
You might be missing out on sales because you have made it complicated to purchase from you. So if I have to hunt for information, if I can’t make quick, easy buying decisions, then I am on to the next business posthaste!
Once upon a time, you had to get off your jacksie (that’s your bum, an 80-year-old bartender in Leeds taught me that), look up where to purchase your wares in the old Yellow Pages, which was conveniently stored on the top of the fridge. Then you jumped in the car to drive around until you found what you needed.
Now, you can click open a browser on your digital device, your cellular phone and such, and find a world full of offers.
If you don’t make it easy, you’re going to miss the sale.
Imagine I purchase from your business; how long do I have to wait until you offer me another product or service? Or do I have to go hunting again? Not re-selling to people who have purchased is a massive sales leak; why find more and more people when you have willing buyers already? You could be hitting your sales goals just by maximising the opportunities right in front of you.
If you have my attention and I am ready to buy, why not package some goodies up for me? Why not utilise add on sales and up-sells, so now you don’t need more customers or sales because you’re making more per sale.
When we add up-sells and add ons to repeat buyers… hello growing profits without spending time and money finding more people or creating more offers.
Got a sales funnel? No? You need one!
All of this magical money-making goodness can be automated, too, if you’re willing to add in a sales funnel.
A sales funnel walks your customers through an easy and logical buying process. Have you ever been on a website and wondered what to do next? Where to go to enquire, or if you’re supposed to schedule a call? Where are the garment sizes? How to make a booking?
Make the buying steps obvious!
You can lead your potential customer through this process with a clearly mapped out sales funnel. When I say clearly mapped out, grab a pen and paper or one of those fancy mind mapping platforms (I use Whimsical) and draw out where people are supposed to go or what they’re supposed to do when they land on your website.
When you map those steps out, you can also apply numbers to those steps and then track those numbers. So now you don’t just have a sales funnel; you have a funnel that will tell us exactly where you are losing buyers.
Yes, we’re talking about numbers to track again...
You need to track the numbers and see what kind of traffic or inquiries we need to make a sale. You can reverse engineer your funnel numbers to tell you how many people need to see your offer to reach your sales goals.
If you have a book a quote kind of business, or a request our price list, track how many people visit your site and book the quote or request the price list. Then, work on improving that number. Again, it’s the small changes that make the biggest difference.
More products does NOT = More sales
Let’s talk about offers now, so we started with sales and worked backwards to sales funnels. Now let’s take another step back to offers. More products or services, or offers don’t always mean more in sales.
It can mean more confusion, more decision fatigue and less conversion. I have worked with clients where we cut their product range by 50%, cleaned up their offers and doubled revenue with the same number of customers.
If adding more and more stuff for your customers to buy is your strategy to increase sales, please stop. Your customers won’t know if they found a rope or lost a cow because they’re so confused.
A big net won’t always catch more fish
Business owners trying to cast a massive net often do this because they don’t know their target market. Instead of a small killer problem-solving offer for a particular set of people, they try to offer a little something to everyone.
When you target everyone, you sell to no one. Niche, baby! The money is in the niche!
If your offers include fat discounts and you use discounting not as a marketing strategy but as a “fill my empty bucket” money strategy, you don’t need more customers to hit your sales goals. You need a better marketing strategy, probably better offers and likely a better sales funnel.
Time to be an attention seeker!
Back another step now to what happens before people see your offers; you have to get their attention! This is the attraction phase.
Your business is just a face in a crowd and a very crowded crowd. We are inundated with buying messages every day; never before has there been a time where so many ads and marketing messages are flooding your way.
As a business owner, your job is to be so bright and sparkly that your ideal customer can’t look past you in a crowded space.
Before you can Peacock about your fabulous feathery plumage (aka branding), you need to know who your plumage is supposed to attract. A peacock doesn’t attempt to attract all the animals in the forest; he doesn’t even want to attract all birds. No, he wants the lady peacocks.
Be specific; what animal are you attracting?
If you’re attempting to communicate to all the animals in the forest, you’re going to fail because your calls will be too broad. No one will know you’re calling out specifically to them.
Marketing messaging and branding is the same; you need to know your audience. Branding is your business outfit to attract the right audience; it’s not about you. Your branding is about your audience being attracted to your outfit.
Messaging is the communication style you use and should include the language your audience can relate to. I made this mistake early on; I used a lot of language in my communication that wasn’t fit for my audience. There was some lousy branding, too, because I didn’t want to be all pink and girly.
Guess what colour features heavily now?
My brand is not about me. As much as I love talking balance sheets, liability, net profit margins, stock turns and such, it’s not the language that turns on my target audience.
My job is to provide my Profit Lovers what they want, using the language they’re comfortable with and once I have won them over, give them what they need.
Gross language that will turn you off fast
I know you need data analysis, cash flow forecasting, profitable margins, etc., but you won’t find that plastered all over my marketing or website. You will find things like “Ready to scale your business, but now sure how? You’re in the right place!”, “Want to grow a Profitable, Liveable and Loveable business? I can help!”.
This helps me illustrate my next point, know the transformation your customer is seeking. Very few people come to me to learn how to read their balance sheets or for me to provide them with COGS margin assumptions.
What are you really selling?
That is something they may need to achieve the transformation, but it’s not what I am selling. I don’t sell the tools I sell the outcome. The outcome is a business that is more profitable, fits into your lifestyle and that you love (at least, most of the time).
When you think about your business as a person, does it have a distinct outfit (branding), a unique personality (is it fun, whimsical, corporate etc.), and a clear voice that communicates outcomes?
Let’s keep moving, your attraction strategy needs to attract people, as I just talked about, but you also need to be seen. You need to be seen by your target audience where they hang out, and you need to be seen many times.
Let me give you the perfect analogy, because you know I love these.
I am single, and happily so, by the way, so don’t message me telling me he is “out there” or he will come when I stop looking. I can dress my fine self up, I can gussy up, I can titivate (which means to smarten up, it’s not sexual, I thought it was sexual…).
If I don’t leave the house or I don’t put myself on a dating app to advertise, so to speak.. the only chance I have of meeting someone is to set my house on fire and hope that at least one of the firemen is single and ready to mingle..with me.
You can’t sell a secret
Your business can have the best branding, the most beautiful website, but if you’re not being seen, you’re not going to grow your business. Posting on social media is an ok way to be seen, but it’s only one way, and it’s often slow and time-consuming to build up a following. Then you have to entice that following to visit your website or enter your premises.
Continuous traffic is your number one goal!
Your goal should be to drive traffic to your business, continuous and if you have a good pricing strategy and understand your numbers. There should be enough fat in your pricing for this amazing thing I like to call paid marketing. That is often the catalyst for scaling up, being willing to invest in bringing people to you instead of hoping they will find you.
Let’s go back to my dating analogy; if I invested in a maker service, I would have the creme’ of the man crop, I could bypass wading through the man masses. Likewise, if I pay for a premium account on a dating site, I get more options to interact.
You have to be seen! You have to be seen often!
Also, can we round up my dating talk just so Profit Lovers don’t start setting me up with their single brothers-in-law or weird cousin Rick, I am as single as a dollar bill and not looking for change.
Time to take another step backwards from attraction to goals… yes, I am talking goals again. I will keep it super quick, so here is the deal.
If you don’t know how many people see your offers, your website, your product pages, then it’s impossible to know if your lack of sales is because people simply don’t like what you’re selling or if you don’t have enough eyes on your business.
Don’t fix problems that don’t exist
If you’re busy changing up your website, for example, you feel like you should be making more in sales, but you haven’t verified that with cold hard data, you’re very likely making a big deal mistake. You may end up negatively impacting your sales by changing something that was previously working.
People who go into Facebook groups for business and post the question, “Hey, my website isn’t getting any sales! Can you please visit it and tell me what’s wrong?” are asking for trouble.
A more appropriate question would be, “I have an X (insert industry type) business and would love to know if anyone is willing to share their conversion stats”. Then you look at yours, do some googling to see if you can find any benchmarks and then compare your business using your google data.
So let’s wrap this up with a few key points for you to consider in your business.
- One - Do you have a good attraction strategy where you’re always driving people to your website or business location?
- Two - Does your website walk people through a logical set of steps from looker to buyer?
- Three - Do you have a map of those steps so you can track the main actions you want them to take, like adding to a cart or completing an enquiry form or making a booking, etc?
- Four - Do you know exactly who you’re making to and is your business branding and messaging crafted to speak directly to them?
- Five - Is it easy for them to make a purchase?
- Six - Is your marketing process automated or does it need a human to be heavily involved?
Before you try to fix a lack of sales by creating more offers, more products and or services, or you start dropping your prices, you make sure you can tick those key points off your list.
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